IT Epigrams revised as of 5:30 PM MT, 01/18/10

• A programmer is a person who had rather talk to a machine than to another person.
• A programmer is a programmer is a programmer - except on his resume where he is either a Software Engineer or a Systems Analyst.
• A rose by any other name does not have to follow the standards for roses.
• A true AI system has built-in people.
• Amateurs write BASIC, clerks write COBOL, professionals write FORTRAN, fools and geniuses write APL, academics write toy languages (examples may be supplied at will), hobbyists write Smalltalk, bit-diddlers write C#. A programmer feels about his favorite language much as Elvis felt about his blue suede shoes.
• Native English speakers are, on average, better programmers than non-native English speakers.
• Ninety percent of IT problems are people problems.
• Ninety percent of the time, IT consultants are hired hit men.
• Programmers rush in where analysts fear to tread.
• Programming instantiates the old magic of making things obey our words: Open Sezme.
• Real scientists stand on each others' shoulders, computer scientists stand on each others' toes.
• Symmetric interfaces have lock-up conditions.
• The more secure a system, the more difficult to use: a totally secure system is totally unusable.
• The most heated arguments in programming are simple, though esoteric: 1. The big endians vs. the little endians (are you inside the machine looking out? or outside the machine looking in?); and 2. Where does counting start: zero or one?
• The shorter the feed-back loop, the less stable the system.
• Three is the magic number (cf. the 3-body problem): beyond three recursions (or three levels of indices) lies madness.

(There is an old one from the early days of OS/360 in Poughkeepsie: On a clear disk you can seek forever.)

Perlis’ Epigrams Reworked

- Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
- Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
- One man's constant is another man's variable.
- Programmers like to read their own code when it is fresh, sometimes when it is not so fresh. Almost all programmers dislike reading others’ code however fresh.
- Programming is an unnatural act.
- Science analyzes. Engineering synthesizes. Programming creates.
- Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
- The IT world is built on the law of the excluded middle. There is no such law in the real world.
- Twenty years at the bitface can convert one to Zoroastrianism
- When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they don't.
- You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you write, even more sure when you teach, but are certain when your program performs to spec.